September 1, 2024 - The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
Good morning, Epiphany. As you might have heard, our local public schools started up this last Monday, and my junior kindergartener, first grader, and sixth grader (as well as their second-grade teaching mother) all now have a week under their belts... and the first grader is already sick. These things happen, but that means no Abbey or Nora today. Prayers for the both of them are appreciated.
I often liked to point out to my kids last year, though, that I was in 22nd grade, having done four years of college after high school and six years of grad work after that. Some of you know what that was like. School continues for me this month too, 23rd grade, I guess; I’m working on a final thesis to finish off my second master’s degree, and you’ll probably hear more about that in sermons to come.
However, the brief story with which I’d like to start my sermon today came from my year in 14th grade, my sophomore year of college, back in 2004. I was 19 years old at the time, and I had never left the state of Illinois for any significant amount of time outside of family vacations. So, of course, I made the completely reasonable and rational decision to study abroad in my sophomore spring, choosing a semester in China for my first steps outside the States from a list of options at my university because it sounded the most “adventurous” and impressive for a future grad school application. My dad struggled a bit dropping me off at the airport that January before his son’s solo flight across the world, but I don’t remember feeling any fear myself, just excitement that I was going to go and see something completely new and different.
Zhong Guo, the Middle Kingdom... China was definitely new and different, and that was immediately noticeable after leaving the airport in Hong Kong and taking a jetlagged, ten-hour bus ride through rural China to our university in Xiamen. Xiamen was a small city of around 2 million people then, it has doubled in size since 2004, and it is located in the Fujian province on the coast just across the Taiwan Strait from Taiwan. On that bus ride, we stopped for food at a small local restaurant, and my new American classmates were shocked that I had never held, let alone practiced with, chopsticks. There were no forks there and no English on the menus either... It was going to be a long semester.
As you might imagine, I have many stories from those four months, but one that came up for me this week specifically involves our Biblical letter (or book) of James. See, our semester abroad program was organized by the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities, and so many of my fourteen classmates were Christians, coming from various universities across America: Azusa Pacific, Biola, Emory, George Fox, Messiah, Olivet, and Taylor, among others. Other classmates came from bigger schools, the University of Virginia, Baylor, and Oregon State among them, but what that meant for me was that not only was I experiencing the wild and disorienting difference of life as a six-foot-tall, white, blonde-haired blue-eyed American in China, but also the disorientation of learning aside a surprisingly diverse, ecumenical group of young Christians, all with different lenses on how they view and live out their faith.
By the second month of our program, one of my closest friends felt like our spiritual development was lacking; we had no church to attend nor any courses in spirituality for fear of drawing too much attention to ourselves as possible illegal missionaries in China. And so, this friend organized an underground Bible study for the Americans and other international students in our dorm, and she chose James chapter 1 for our first gathering.
James, as you may or may not know, has a bit of an odd place in the biblical canon. As I mentioned in our email newsletter last week, Martin Luther himself was not James’ biggest fan; he wanted it, along with a few other books, taken out of the New Testament during the Reformation, placing it at the end of his own translation, in an appendix of sorts, in 1522. (I’ve confirmed with Pastor Bob that Lutherans today don’t mind James, so all is well.) Luther and others disliked James for a wide range of reasons, but primary among them is that James barely mentions Jesus at all. He only does so in describing himself and his audience as servants of the Lord Jesus Christ. The letter of James has a strong emphasis on works and action, so much so that preachers for centuries had lost the idea of salvation by faith, of a gift freely and graciously given like we’ve talked about here at Epiphany in recent weeks, and some had disagreed with it enough to leave it out altogether. The letter of James is also clearly written specifically to a Jewish audience, and it’s addressed to them in the very first verse, whereas nearly all of Paul’s letters included in the Bible are written to the Gentiles, to the churches, to those who are being welcomed into the faith in light of Jesus. For some throughout history, then, James doesn’t seem to fit... so yes, the letter has had its share of controversy over the centuries.
But our James text today might seem pretty straightforward. You can pull out your bulletin and keep it in front of you, it begins at the bottom of page 6, and this is verses 17-27 of chapter 1, a little typo there. Because so much of this passage is just so good and vital, I kind of want to go through it verse by verse, but I’ll try to resist the temptation.
In the first paragraph: “every generous act is from above,” coming down from the Father of lights, an old Jewish idiom for God... Everything we do in love shows us to be a “first fruits of God’s creatures.” There’s a whole sermon in that, that we are a showcase of God’s fulfilled promises and intentions for creation when we live into God’s fully abundant love. We ourselves, we Christians, we are the first fruits of the Kingdom of God.
The second paragraph likewise is incredibly rich: be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger... rid yourselves of wickedness. Yes to all of that, especially that “quick to listen, slow to speak” part for most of us in Western society today. They’re good words, important advice. Then, "welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls" ...again, James gives us another good news/gospel sermon here: We need not save our souls on our own, through works, but Christ, implanted within us through our regular growth into his likeness, Christ has that power to save us if we just welcome him in. I promised I wouldn’t talk about the bread of life again this week but please know that it fits in here. Christ has the power, we need merely to invite him to live through us.
The third paragraph today is the core of this section, and it’s also where some preachers get into trouble with heresies. Pelagianism is chief among them, where we can earn our own way to salvation through works... Instead, here, James merely writes a precursor to his more famous passage that comes up in next Sunday’s lectionary: essentially, your faith requires you to act. “Be doers of the word,” he writes. Do not hear or read a sermon or lesson or verse or podcast or poem or article or book or prayer or collect that inspires you.. do not hear or read and then simply forget. Let them change your very life. Everything about our faith should be transformational; if what we believe is true, we cannot hear it and not be changed.
In our fourth/final paragraph, it’s clear that some who heard the good news sadly are left unchanged, even in the first century. James here echoes our gospel reading, where Jesus quotes Isaiah who writes, “the people honor God with their lips while their hearts are far from God.” In James’ words, if you think you are religious and your words and actions are not changed, well, “your religion is worthless.” Faith requires action, not as a to-do list to keep God happy or a checklist to somehow earn a passing grade, but as proof that your faith is real. And those who act in faith, James writes, “they will be blessed in their doing.”
Finally, James hits his readers over the head with a mic drop of a line, one which those who assembled the Bible way back in the day chose to end chapter 1. “Religion which is pure and undefiled before God is this: care for orphans and widows in their distress and keep oneself unstained by the world.” Phew. Again, there’s an entire sermon in that single verse. When we think of “religion” even today, we likely think of this (gestures wildly). We think of proper worship, of good music, of adequate preaching, of sacraments... maybe here at Epiphany we think of community, of brunch, maybe even of mission, of our efforts in Pullman or Ward One. But for James, and for the Jewish people of the first century, pure religion was now directly defined as caring for those most in danger... in a patriarchal society, that was fatherless orphans and husbandless widows. Religion was simply caring for all in need and not letting the culture of the world distract from following God.
So, I would like to think that there’s an easy way to end this sermon: what does religion look like for us today? If we want to be the first fruits of God, living into God’s abundant love... if we want to allow the implanted word to lead us forward to action, to being doers of the word... if we want to be religious in all the good ways as a result of God’s gifts and not in an attempt to earn them... well, what does that call us to do?
But sadly, there isn’t an easy or obvious answer here. I told the story about my time in China in part because you might find it interesting, but also because that Bible study that my friend organized to discuss James? Well, it only met once. You see, the international and ecumenical group of Christians gathered in a dorm room across the Pacific in 2004 could not discuss this chapter without intense disagreement. James is controversial, in part, because the practical application of our faith is actually quite difficult to figure out. In China, we all came from such different and diverse backgrounds that we could not see eye to eye on what living out our faith should look like. We all thought we knew what was most important, where our time should be spent, which issues deserved the most attention, and we all disagreed. Essentially, each of us defined our own supposedly shared Christian religion differently, some of us even at odds with James here. As teenagers and twenty somethings we surely were not quick to listen or slow to speak, so that might have been part of our trouble...
But when I look at the world today, when I look at the examples of the Christian religion in this country alone, I see very little about caring for those most in need or being unstained by the culture of accumulation, ambition, affluence, influence, and power. I see many, even on our own side of whatever issues we think are most important, whose hearts are far from God.
This is not an easy or straightforward call, then, to be doers of the word and not merely hearers who deceive ourselves. We have work ourselves to do, and that work must come flowing out of a heart that is not far from God, that is not worshipping in vain, that is deeply rooted in the implanted word of Jesus living within us.
James is not simply writing for a Jewish audience in the first century. He is writing for us here today. What does it actually look like for our religion, our church, our parish, our community, for us to actually and practically live into our faith? What does it mean for us individually in our families, our friend groups, our relationships, our neighborhoods?
It is my prayer for us here this morning that we, individually and collectively, will take time to listen to the word, to the implanted word of God within us that has the power to save, and then that we not forget, that we become doers who act on a daily basis out of abundant love for God and for our neighbor... and that we, as James writes, will then be blessed in all our doing. Amen.
Comments